


Names Redacted to Protect the Innocent

by SongAboutExiles



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Don't Ask Don't Tell, M/M, Protective Rodney, Repressed John, references to intense homophobia and adolescent abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:21:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1596383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SongAboutExiles/pseuds/SongAboutExiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney learns a secret, holds John's future in the palm of his hands, and rises to the occasion. </p>
<p>"I never made promises lightly<br/>And there have been some that I've broken<br/>But I swear in the days still left<br/>We'll walk in fields of gold" Sting's Fields of Gold</p>
            </blockquote>





	Names Redacted to Protect the Innocent

**Author's Note:**

> This was lingering unfinished on my Google docs and I came across it today and felt an epic compelling need to finish it. Consider it a reminder and a cautionary tale of what 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' cost gay service members every goddamned day. This is set several years pre-repeal, between S1 and S2.

“You sure you don’t mind waiting?” John asked, stripping off his uniform jacket and laying it across his desk chair. “It’ll only take a minute.”

“No, no, by ALL means, take a shower.” Rodney sank down on the end of John’s bed, weariness writ in every slumping, defeated line of his body. “I’ll just be right here, not smelling as bad as you.”

“You can always go on to the mess hall, I’m sure you can hold the movie for me.” The surprising Major Lorne had produced his prized copy of The Princess Bride, and there was a showing in the dining room in fifteen minutes, complete with the first popcorn seen in Atlantis for nearly a year.

Rodney snorted and flopped onto his back, crook of his arm blocking out even the low light spilling through the bathroom door. “Yeah. I’ll get right on that.”

“Uh huh. You do that, Rodney.”

Then even that small light was gone, leaving Rodney in the semi-blackness of Atlantean night, sprawled on John’s bed with nothing but the image of the other man stripping off his sweaty clothes and throwing them in the laundry recycler burning itself onto the backs of his eyelids. “Nnngh, goddamnit.” The low-level background radiation of his hunger for John Sheppard generally stayed nice and manageable, at least until he returned to his own bed at the end of an impossible day, when he had the luxury of putting his hand down his pants and jerking off hard and fast and with the damnable man’s name on his gasping lips.

Rodney flopped over onto his belly to press his suddenly aching cock against the mattress, an almost infantile attempt at self-soothing thwarted by the sudden collision of his flailing hand with the picture frame on John’s bedside table. It crashed to the floor, and he heard the unwelcome sound of things coming apart from other things, which was just never a good sign. “Fuck a duck.” He peered over the edge and saw dimly that the frame had come apart at the corners, but at least there was no broken glass.

Nothing for it but to fix his mess. Rodney sat up and gathered the pieces, eyes adjusted to the bright moonlight streaming in through the window, mentally bracing himself for John’s shitfit. There were no such things as mistakes without consequences, or accidents for which he wasn’t held accountable. When he reached for the picture itself, though, Rodney had to stop and smile at the image of John with his sister and niece. He’d never asked why John didn’t send a message to them when the letters went home, and why he’d never mentioned seeing them on the last trip back to Earth. They looked happy, but then John also looked about five or six years younger. A lot could change.

As Rodney was peering at the preternaturally attractive family photo, though, he started to notice that something felt off. The picture was too thick for the quality of the paper, so he turned it over in his square, capable hands.

Now that was a surprise.

Affixed to the back of the family photo was another picture, older and frayed at the edges, with creases carefully pressed out when it was glued to thin card stock. A very young John, maybe sixteen, with one arm wrapped around the bare shoulders of a slighter boy of roughly the same age. The other hand was obviously holding the camera. It might have been innocent except that John wasn’t wearing a shirt either. Except that the boy had his face smushed into John’s throat, kissing the stubbly skin, perhaps even trying to distract him from his photojournalism. Except for the fact that they were lying in a mussed bed with blue sheets. Two heads of hair, straight black and golden curls, spread out on a pillow.

Rodney knew he should just put the picture back together properly, but he couldn’t let go of it that quickly. He’d never seen John look quite like that, not even when he was mooning over Chaya. He’d never seen John look that simply happy. His fingers traced the curve of John’s cheek. Did this change anything? Could it possibly matter that once upon a time John loved another boy? He’d put it away, hidden it away, and if anything the stakes were even higher now for the sweet boy who’d become the man he so desired. Impossibly high.

“Don’t tell.” The sudden, ragged plea in the quiet, darkened room would ordinarily make Rodney yelp like a stepped-on cat, but this time he just turned his eyes to John, towel wrapped around his waist, framed in the bathroom light. “Please, Rodney, don’t tell.”

An indignant response formed just behind Rodney’s teeth, ready to spit out ‘how dare you think I’d do such a thing?’ until he looked closer and saw the complex grief shadowing a face that really shouldn’t be made more beautiful by its presence. Of course, Rodney thought, he’s the kind who’s pretty when he’s sad. “Never, John. I’d never tell.”

John smelled of standard-issue Ivory soap and clean skin as he sat heavily next to Rodney, long fingers closing on the picture and pulling it to safety in his own hands. That tremor in John’s hands as they tightened around the edges of the fragile photo frightened Rodney, and for a sick moment he was sure John was going to tear it up, and that was just bad horrible wrong. So wrong it made Rodney take a very big risk, uncalculated, from his gut. “Tell me about him.”

The look John shot him was usually the sort reserved for unbearably inappropriate questions like ‘which hand do you jack off with?’ and not a request for information about an ex-boyfriend. “Rodney…you don’t want to know.”

“I do. His name at least. Start with his name.”

“Jamie. His name’s Jamie, but last I heard people were calling him Jim.” That boy did not look like a ‘Jim’. “I haven’t talked to him for twenty years. Or about him.” John took a breath, then forced himself to put the picture down in his lap before he cut his fingers on the edges. “Jamie called me Jack--only one, ever.”

Rodney made a piss poor counselor, but it was a lot easier when every word he could draw out of John was such an utter revelation about the man. “That’s a beautiful picture. You were beautiful together.”

That’s when it occurred to Rodney that John might actually have been afraid of Rodney disapproving, because the look that John gave him was shocked, even grateful. It made Rodney’s stomach hurt. “I…thank you. We got caught together, in his room, on that bed. He was the son of my dad’s commanding officer.”

Now Rodney felt sick, just imagining that scene. “I’m sorry.” It was feeble, foolish, and utterly heartfelt. “I can’t…it must have been horrible.”

“I’ve had some beatings in my life, but that one stands out. I was grounded for a semester, and after that my parents were constantly going through my drawers, looking under my mattress, in my closet, making sure I wasn’t sneaking ‘gay stuff’ into the house.” John’s voice was too flat, as if even his ordinary laconic drawl had been trampled down.

“What about Jamie?” Rodney almost didn’t want to know, but it seemed important.

“He’s a Marine. He got shipped off to a boarding school, away from me.” John took the pieces of the broken frame and started to fit them together, easing the grooves home. “I learned my lesson.”

“You learned how to be straight?” Could you teach me? Rodney was glad he kept that part to himself. This was no time for making moves.

“I learned to be empty.” John said it so simply.

“No. No, don’t say that.” It was, undeniably, the wrong time for a cheap pass. But what about a sincere declaration? “Maybe it’s time to forget that lesson.” Or possibly cram it right up their collective asses, which had Rodney’s wholehearted endorsement. Rodney took the frame from John’s hands and set it on the table again before touching the man’s cheek, raising up his eyes. Another dreadful, uncalculated risk, and if he kept this up he was going to turn into some kind of hero or something.

“Rodney…no. No, I care about you, but…this is Atlantis. I lose it all if it happens again.” And yet John wasn’t pulling away from Rodney.

“I won’t let it happen again. We’re not children, John. We know how to lie and do it convincingly.” Rodney couldn’t fathom turning his back on what he’d just seen in John’s eyes, the frightening blankness.

“It’s no kind of life, Rodney.” The words were slow, patient, as if John were speaking to a child.

“No, John, but I think it’s a damn sight better than nothing.” All it took was a thought, a heartbeat, to cross the line. To move from nothing to something. Rodney’s mouth softened with the kiss, turned from caustic to gentle, from anxious to obsessive. John froze against him and then he felt the man’s hands on his biceps, which existed, thank you very much. John’s mouth, god had he thought about John’s mouth, the wry slash that turned up at one corner as if permanently tethered there, the rare smiles that reached his eyes. Oh, John had everyone fooled into thinking he was nothing more than a happy-go-lucky flyboy, but again...not Rodney. Rodney had never bought it.

Rodney was never just everyone. He was the inter-galactic expert on John Sheppard, and he was going for the goddamned doctorate. 

He bought the compromise even less as John’s grip tightened almost painfully, the muscles of well-trained hands growing more taut as his mouth relaxed, let him in, and Rodney tried to stop thinking about how fucking awesome this was, the feeling of his tongue touching John’s teeth, the enormous triumph of them parting, and then dizzying back-and-forth that followed.

Rodney pulled back because eventually humans needed air but his eyes opened, took in John’s expression. John may have made eyes at half the pretty girls in the Pegasus galaxy, but he’s sure not one of them kissed like that. If even one did, would John be here now?

“It is.” The words emerged as a soft, almost inaudible murmur. “It is so much more than ‘better than nothing,’” John whispered. “Just. Don’t. Tell.”

“Never.” Even if this was the single best thing he’d ever felt, Rodney would never tell a soul. Not even Carson. Not even if they stumbled across alien honesty spores or some such shit. No, he’d sew his fucking mouth closed. “I really want to kiss you again.”  

By now, John’s fingers had probably bruised Rodney’s arms, but Rodney doubted John even realized. It was so claiming, so demanding--stay here, right here--and yet John was all passive and sweet and so fucking fragile it made Rodney want to invent time travel just so he could go back and lock whatever door those teenage boys had forgotten, listen for the tell-tale click of someone picking up another line during a covert phone conversation, cover the tracks of adolescent love, anything to protect John from all of that bullshit.  

“I want...you.” Three simple words, and yet Rodney felt the weight of them, then pulled the other man in so he could taste them, too. Sweet, so goddamned sweet, and then John remembered that he wasn’t a girl, that Rodney, despite endless bitching to the contrary, could take it. Could take him, could take a rough and demanding kiss and hands unclenching to grab his short hair and soon Rodney was sliding his own hands down John’s chest, finding dark nipples and thumbing them like he knew what he was doing.

The shuddery gasp into his somewhat obscenely open mouth was answer that maybe this was another thing in the list of ‘shit Rodney can figure out on the fly because John’s depending on him.’ It was seriously one long-ass list. In fact, that gasp made Rodney go from stroking his thumbs over the tiny peaks to a light pinching, noting that now he’d achieved a balls-deep moan, and one of John’s hands unclenched enough to reach down and wrench open the hastily-twisted towel, just in time for his hips to buck up.

Now this, Rodney had to see. He pulled away from the kiss and let his eyes roam down bared skin, all the way to the hard dick reaching up from a still-damp nest of dark curls. One of his friends, a female microbiology major with whom he’d suffered through his Freshman composition requirement, had once said that the ability to find male genitalia actually, really, no-holds-barred hot as hell--to look at the whole package and think ‘damn, I need to get that in my mouth, NOW’ was the sure marker for at least a four or so on the Kinsey scale, if not the whole six. And, well, here he was some time later and his mouth was fucking watering to get that inside. Maybe he should email her or something. No names, no identifying markers, all redacted to protect the innocent. 

Rodney curled his fingers around John’s cock and then John was scrabbling at his undone uniform jacket again until he could pull Rodney’s mouth to his again, now, to hold the moans he couldn’t stifle. And wasn’t that just...Jesus Christ, his fucking heart. Go decades pretending you don’t have one because it’s just fucked anyway and dysfunctional and better not to discuss it, and then in one night have it broken and remade so many times Rodney thinks he should just be dead of it by now. “I…John, let me…”

There as a protest as Rodney broke the kiss, then another as his hand moved away from the aching hardness that needed to IN something, and God did Rodney sympathize. The protest died away when Rodney landed on his knees between John’s bare thighs, rubbing his cheek along the length of swollen flesh, feeling the vein beneath pulsing against his skin. Thinking ahead, Rodney pressed two fingers from his left hand into John’s kiss-swollen mouth just as he steadied the man’s cock with the other and let his lips open around the obscenely precome-slicked head of John’s dick.

Yeah, that was...oh god. Rodney’s eager tongue lapped up every drop, then his mouth descended, deeper and deeper with each hard suckle, until John hit the back of his throat. For a first-timer, that, Rodney thought with some vastly distant clinical part of his mind, was not bad at all. Work on that gag reflex, note to self. Because he wanted it, Jesus fucking <b>Christ</b> he wanted it, all the way down.

From the way John gripped Rodney’s wrist bruisingly tight and sucked and bit hard at his fingers, it was just fucking fine anyway. He held the base of John’s cock firmly and then realized he could stroke his fingers up to meet his lips and just a few heartbeats after he figured that out and implemented it, John was biting <b>hard</b> at the pads of flesh at the very bottom of Rodney’s fingers as his hips bucked up hard and he came like it was the fucking end of the world and who wants to be Raptured with those assholes after all? Fuck them, fuck all those small-minded idiots, because every last thought shredded around Rodney’s own orgasm, and what was he, Deep Throat or something, getting off hard on sucking John’s cock

It was messy and not pretty and John apparently did not care in the least as he frantically dragged Rodney back up and pushed him down on the narrow bed, kissing him like he needed it to live and draping over the bigger man’s body like he could miraculously be everywhere at once, his hard-muscled thigh shoving up only to find a dampness to match Rodney’s deep blush. “You...Jesus, you came from sucking me off?” John’s voice was so rough, so low.

“Um, apparently.” He had to get the words out around John’s insistent tongue, which at the moment was insisting on licking his own tongue clean of his own seed. “Pathetic...I know…”

“Fuck no. Hot as hell. Still want to see you...all of you..taste everything, do every-fucking-thing…” Because John was sixteen again, and Rodney was his all you can eat buffet.

Even so, even though every nerve in his body was screaming fuck, yes, now, and please, Rodney knew that he had a responsibility here. John was gone, judgment packed for the journey, fingers already arguing with Rodney’s uniform trousers.And the movie started ten minutes ago...and Rodney made a solemn goddamned vow to this man he loved so damn desperately. “John, shhh, sweetheart…” Sweetheart, too much? It just stumbled right out before he could stop it, and so there it is, and they’d both have to deal now, wouldn’t they? “Sweetheart, I have to go to the movie. Look at me.” He held John’s face in his hands. “I have no idea where you are, or if you’ll show up or not.

Rodney willed John to just understand. And yes, there it was, dawning as the arousal subsided. “Yeah, I was feeling kinda exhausted when we parted back at the lift. Before I went off to my quarters.”

“And I have no idea where you are, what am I? The John Whisperer all of a sudden? Have you done a female headcount?” Rodney’s lips slid into his own version of the lopsided smile.

“God, you’re right--you’re good at this. You’ll come back. After?”

“After, John…” He stroked his thumbs over John’s cheekbones, then leaned in to nuzzle his cheek against one stupid-adorable elf-ear. “If the coast is clear, I’ll be right back here at your door.”

He felt John’s smile more than saw it, and it made his heart thump hard in his chest. This fucking man is going to be the death of me, Rodney thought, pulling back slowly. “I’m going to go clean up in your bathroom, and then I’ll go. But I will be back. And John…” He made sure to catch the man’s eyes. “No. One. Will. Know.”

“I will.” Two simple words, a whole galaxy full of possible.

And Rodney was not about to let this particular possibility down, not for one nanosecond, not for anything at all.


End file.
